On the lobster: David Foster Wallace and the B-52s

Were his preferences taken into consideration?

The last weekend of August seems the perfect time to link to David Foster Wallace's wondrous and unsettling "Consider the Lobster" -- originally published in the August 2004 issue of Gourmet, and endlessly re-readable. It starts as an account of his visit to the venerable Maine Lobster Festival, but inevitably -- this being DFW -- turns into a meditation on whether lobsters feel pain, and if they do, whether they might prefer that we not boil them alive for our gustatory pleasure -- and, given the strong possibility that they could have such a preference, whether in fact it might be not OK, morally speaking, for us to do that (ie, boil lobsters alive for our aforementioned gustatory pleasure).

The whole thing is eminently quotable, but I particularly enjoy the (thematically unrelated) footnote -- yes, of course, there are footnotes -- in which Wallace contemplates the nature of tourism:

My personal experience has not been that traveling around the country is broadening or relaxing, or that radical changes in place and context have a salutary effect, but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way—hostile to my fantasy of being a real individual, of living somehow outside and above it all.... To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.

More than any of his other non-fiction pieces (all of which you should read right now, as in right this very instant), "Consider the Lobster" encapsulates everything that made DFW brilliant and exasperating: he could turn even a trip to the Maine Lobster Festival into an intense -- and utterly inconclusive -- exercise in moral self-examination. That may sound unbearable, but part of the deep and lasting pleasure of reading Wallace is observing a writer with an agile mind and an open heart trying to work his way around questions that make most of us (at the very least) profoundly ill at ease: What do I think about this?

I particularly love the way, after having thoroughly chewed over (as it were) the possibility of the lobster having its own point of view re: the whole being boiled alive thing, Wallace simply admits defeat and tosses the whole thing back into the reader's lap:

Given the (possible) moral status and (very possible) physical suffering of the animals involved, what ethical convictions do gourmets evolve that allow them not just to eat but to savor and enjoy flesh-based viands (since of course refined enjoyment, rather than just ingestion, is the whole point of gastronomy)?

I can't begin to imagine what the editors of Gourmet thought they were getting when they invited Wallace to write this piece, or how the magazine's upscale readership reacted to sentences like the one quoted above.

And finally, because I can't think of any intelligent way to end this: